Xi'an City Wall with crowds waiting in front of the train station

Xi’an! That’s it.

I flopped a bit my plans as I decided to go away again to Tianshui tomorrow morning. Tianshui is half way from Lanzhou, another big and polluted city on my way. But Tianshui should be nice, according to Lonely Planet. And there is some big Buddha stuff to look around. I also was disappointed with Xi’an; I wanted to take some nice pictures of the buildings and small streets in the Muslim neighborhood, but everything is under-re-construction. So everything is pretty nice, you just have to ignore the dust and machines and stuff that’s in your face.

Here, for example, is the wonderful and amazing Bell Tower (or the Drum one, I never know) of Xi’an, were awful musical show are held for the tourists all day long. But you can’t even see the damn tower because of the constructions! Well, it’s for the good cause since it’s for a subway line, which is going to be great because Xi’an traffic is terrible.

But still! What about me? And the air is really swampy. It’s actually so humid and polluted in the same time that my camera’s auto-focus doesn’t work! There ain’t no focus!
So I go around, totally unfocused. But at least that have helped me refocus on my itinerary (which I will soon have to post…): no more flopping around! I realized there is so much to see and do in Xinjiang that if I start being slow in the beginning it’s never gonna end.

So now I just have to keep caution from the hanging (see on the right…) and it all should be good. In the meantime I have to learn again to go around by myself. It always takes a couple of days to get used to, specially at meal time. But it’s good. Today I shopped for some street food, so I asked people what things were and etc… makes me discover and practice my Chinese.

I also went to see the big mosque, the biggest one in Chine supposedly. It’s quite interesting that this construction started in the 8th century, under the Tang dynasty. That means that Muslims (usually Hui people) and Han Chinese have lived together for over a thousand years. And then we hear about the threat of the growing Islam population around the world (special American fear, as they often see Europe as having been conquered by Islam). Ah. It was also quite funny to see a mosque with Chinese style architecture! It looked like the Forbidden City, except for the praying hall with the lined carpets… Even the minaret is disguised as a Chinese Bell tower or whatever.

Ciao.

I know it’s quite disappointing but I did not go to my private dance lessons last night! When I thought about it that would have been way too embarrassing as everyone would have stopped dancing to look at me dancing with an old grandma and being stupid (because I don’t know these dances!). Well, maybe I could have managed but I didn’t find the courage at the given time.

But many others (thousands and maybe even billions) opportunities to have strange experiences are on the way; because, as the old and wise saying goes: “the one who travel on the remnants of the Silk Road is bound to do cool stuff”. Ha.

To come back to our mouton, I am now in Xi’an, for the second time in history (I do not count my previous reincarnations). Xi’an, capital of the Chinese Empire for 13 dynasties and which 8 meters tall walls are 1400 years old. I had a non fruitful conversation on the train in Chinese with… a Chinese guy. But my Chinese is terrible, so it didn’t go that far. He had allergy from something, so his eyes looked like a raccoon. So he was going back home to study something. Yep, fruitful.

But I’ve changed my mind and I will try to get a ticket for Lanzhou for tomorrow night, so I can really get started with this Silk Road business of mine…